Rotting barracks in Arkhangelsk (71 photos + 3 videos)

Dilapidated housing is a long-standing problem in many Russian cities. This problem is very acute in Arkhangelsk, where residents of entire districts are forced to live in old wooden barges. Recently, a blogger visited the First Five-Year Plan area, locally known as "Sulphate", and spoke about the terrible conditions that ordinary people are forced to endure.

Below is the author's text.

Wooden barracks were built in Arkhangelsk in the 30s. Some of them were declared uninhabitable in the early 1980s. Here is the story of a house that was declared unsafe several times. During its existence, this barrack was repaired only once, in 1962.

This is the entrance to the entrance. No, these are not the consequences of the flood. There is always water here. Those who want to get home jump on the bridge, risking falling into the water.

Nobody cleans up the garbage here either, since the water is constantly standing in some places, and the janitors need special equipment for cleaning. But he's not there. This garbage is many years old.

Rats are in no hurry to escape from a sinking ship. They calmly run along logs, jump like squirrels, and are not at all afraid of people.

Cats, unlike rats, do not want to jump on water and only hiss while sitting in the windows.

The houses stand right in the black rotten water.

Residents are forced to raise their makeshift sidewalks higher and higher. In spring, the water level rises and houses are flooded.

Entrance to the entrance.

These are communal apartments. It’s 2015, but in Arkhangelsk people live in communal apartments like these.

People are not very willing to talk. Some are embarrassed, others are simply tired of giving interviews to journalists. But everyone's story is pretty much the same. They promise - we wait - they promise - they promise - they promise... Someone manages to achieve compensation. Someone wins in court and gets new housing. But the majority remains to live here, unable to fight the system.

The road to the house.

Everything here is flooded. And I came here in the summer.

In the spring, the entire area floods, and it looks like this:

People are forced to build bridges from scrap materials in order to at least get home. In their apartments they make special pallets on which they place household appliances to prevent short circuits. And they wear rubber boots... Russia, 21st century.

Once again: this happens every year. But for some reason, local residents failed to reach out to the authorities. Could you have come up with something? If there is no money for normal sewerage, you can dig primitive ditches, in the end. Why are people forced to endure this hell every spring?

The cause of the emergency, as I understand it, is not only melt water. Sometimes it just breaks through the sewer. The same wooden barracks suffer, as well as drivers of cars that fall into holes on washed-out roads.

If a hurricane happens and the Northern Dvina overflows its banks, then the same old wooden houses end up in the affected area.

There are only wooden floorings for passage.

Go ahead.

The naked eye can see that the house is badly skewed. It's hard to believe that someone lives here...

But the light outside the window says that people live here too.

The media wrote about mass “derailments” back in 2003. The barracks simply fall on their side or, at best, settle and rest on the ground. In such houses, sewer pipes usually burst, and rats escaping from the ship move from basements to apartments.

This is the corridor of a residential building.

The black spots are a foul-smelling fungus that has affected all the walls. Sometimes you look at the ceiling, and it seems that it is black from the soot of a fire. But this is a fungus that thrives in such conditions.

The floors in the house do not just go in waves: there are differences of up to a meter in some places. The house is falling apart, partitions are breaking in some rooms.

Pay attention to the floor.

After another “shrinkage,” the wall in this room was broken in half, and the window simply fell out. The residents have left. You can leave if you have somewhere to go.

The room of the lucky ones who were relocated.

There are holes in the floor; they are filled with boards.

The kitchen consists of three sinks and two washing machines. I didn’t rent the bathroom, there’s simply no light there. “We don’t even put in the light bulbs, they burn out immediately,” says one of the residents.

Everything is falling apart.

Second floor. Judging by the stroller, children grow up here. I would really like to invite deputies to such a house who are worried about the demographics in Russia and do not understand why women refuse to give birth and run to have an abortion. How many of them are ready to raise children in such conditions? No heating (you need to light the stove), no hot water and basic amenities.

The woman says that two days ago the ceiling collapsed here, almost killing one of the residents.

Yes, people live in such a house.

Another district of Arkhangelsk, another barracks.

At the entrance there is firewood and a stove.

An ordinary communal apartment.

Next house.

The mayor of Arkhangelsk, Viktor Pavlenko, skillfully shifts the blame for the failure of the program for relocation from dilapidated housing to the Housing and Communal Services Reform Assistance Fund. They say that it is the state corporation that is responsible for the fact that “none of the serious companies” undertakes the construction of new housing for displaced people. Pavlenko believes that the cost of building a square meter of housing in Arkhangelsk should be 45-50 thousand rubles, while the Fund has set a maximum price of 36.4 thousand rubles, and no developer allegedly undertakes to build houses so cheaply.

Of the 1,002 unsafe houses in the Arkhangelsk region, a quarter - 249 - are located in Arkhangelsk.

On the website "Housing and Communal Services Reform" you can see their addresses, and at the same time find out that out of 84.53 thousand sq. m. meters of emergency housing in the city, residents of only 0.07 thousand square meters were resettled. meters, and then until 2013. This is only 16 houses (according to the website of the Housing and Communal Services Fund).

For another 40 houses, resettlement is behind schedule by more than 3 months (in fact, for longer periods), since the displaced were supposed to move to new houses back in 2014. And the resettlement of the remaining 193 houses has not even begun.

It is important to take into account that we are talking only about those emergency houses that are recognized as such by the authorities. There are probably still a hundred or two houses that they “forgot” to classify as dilapidated housing.

You can often hear the excuse of officials - they say, we offer options, but people don’t like them. It’s hard for me to imagine what should be offered to a person who lives with rats in a rotten barracks so that he wouldn’t like it.

And one more house...

And further...

The road to the house. Inside, the picture is approximately the same everywhere.

People live in this house!

This is Arkhangelsk.

House.

3 billion 170 million rubles were allocated for the construction of new housing for displaced people in Arkhangelsk, with only 25.6 million from the city budget, and 917 million from the regional budget. The city receives the rest of the money from the Housing and Communal Services Reform Assistance Fund. That is, the mayor’s office has funds, and not their own, but it was important to simply distribute them correctly.

From the municipal program of the mayor's office it follows that in 2014 845 people were to be resettled, in 2015 - 1669 people, in 2016 - 2207, and in 2017 - 449. But from the data of the Housing and Communal Services Fund we already know that in the past This year, the Arkhangelsk mayor’s office has already failed the resettlement.

In fact, 18-20 thousand barracks residents are awaiting relocation to normal housing. These figures have been repeatedly voiced both by local media and by Mayor Pavlenko himself. So the program, which included a little more than 5 thousand people until 2017, looks like a mockery of those who are forced to live in inhumane conditions.

Even State Duma deputies paid attention to the housing situation in Arkhangelsk. At their instigation, the prosecutor's office became interested in the activities of the mayor's office. But the mayor confidently replies that he did everything right. In the end, the emergency housing came back to haunt the government of the Arkhangelsk region, which reluctantly declared that it would independently resolve this issue and would not allow the mayor’s office of Arkhangelsk to get involved with it. But why then are mayors needed?

By the way, the son of the mayor of Arkhangelsk, Alexander Pavlenko, works as deputy head of the administrative and technical control department of the Urban Development Department...

At the end of April, a “seminar” on dilapidated housing was held in Arkhangelsk, the participants of which were residents of these same barracks. They agreed to organize a protest against the inaction of the authorities after the May holidays, but in the end they did not dare...

Once again, 20,000 people in Arkhangelsk live in inhumane conditions, in rotten communal apartments without amenities. But in the coming years it is planned to solve the issue of only 5,000 people. What should the rest of us do? How can I help them?

Okay, would you like me to show you the center of Arkhangelsk? Maybe you think that I deliberately found three rotten barracks somewhere on the outskirts. Here's the very center!

And this is Sulfate again.

Sometimes houses burn down.

After a fire, the remains are not even cleaned up.

When the house can be resettled, it is demolished. After demolition, everything is left to rot and the garbage is not removed.

Ordinary children.

No alcohol.

There is a swamp.

Kindergarten.

You have to understand that I still arrived at a good time. If I had come here in the spring, I would have found a picture like this.

Or this one.

Road to the temple.

Yard with a red car.

Looks like a horror movie.

I drive further, the Maymax area. A woman and her daughter are drawing water... Something is wrong... Right behind the pump is a garbage dump!

The entire swamp is littered with garbage. But this doesn't bother people. They don't take out garbage here.

The Maimaksa district (aka “Mexico” to the locals) is the garbage capital of Arkhangelsk. Several spontaneous landfills have sprung up here. Local residents do not remember the last time the garbage was removed. At the same time, they pay for garbage removal, but it does not disappear anywhere. It seems that the management company Uyut should deal with the garbage in Maimaks.

One of the courtyards, located in the middle of five houses, was completely overgrown with garbage. There are no garbage cans anywhere nearby, although they say that there used to be.

There are huge landfills in every yard. The management company "Uyut" simply stopped collecting garbage.

Some landfills are not removed for six months, others, according to local residents, are not cleaned up for 2 years!

It's hard for me to believe that this is possible. But again, this is not an isolated case. This is in every yard.

There are landfills everywhere.

Landfills are also growing in other areas of Arkhangelsk - for example, in Solombala or in the south of the city, next to the Okruzhny Highway. But there this phenomenon has not yet reached catastrophic proportions.

The forest is littered with garbage.